Everything
by AllAboardtheSSVNormandy
Summary: There's a simple reason why we keep following you, Skulduggery, no matter what mistakes you make. You're everything to us; without you, we have nothing.
1. Are You Home?

_Two Years Ago_

Skulduggery warned her, before they got out of the car, that Sensitives did not always understand what they were.

"They're adepts, of course, but they can… lose themselves."

Valkyrie blinked, not understanding. "What do you mean? How do you lose yourself? It's not like you can set yourself down and walk off."

Skulduggery paused. "Finbar said it was like being in a crowd of people at a football game and not knowing where your seat was. I don't know how reliable that is, but there you have it."

"What does that have to do with Sara?"

"She, for lack of a better word, 'lost' herself. Then she killed a few people, among them her parents, who were mortal and didn't know what she was. _She_ doesn't know what she is, and that's our problem."

"…So… we're going to tell her?"

"Nope," Skulduggery said cheerfully. "We're going to get her into the car and take her back to the Sanctuary, alive. I'm _hoping_ that she won't try to kill us along the way, because it's very hard to persuade her not to. I mean, she's practically insane, and we're going in there to reason with her. I wonder what that says about us?"

Before Valkyrie could come up with an answer, he got out of the car and strode across the lawn of the small, suburban house. It looked just like the houses on either side, but while the other homes had people peering out at the disguised skeleton and his young sidekick, nobody seemed to be home at this one.

They knew this because when they rang the doorbell, nobody answered.

"Maybe she's not in there," Valkyrie said.

"Maybe she's not," Skulduggery agreed, "But she probably is." He stooped and picked up the welcome mat, revealing a spare set of keys underneath. With those, he unlocked the door. He neatly replaced them and set the welcome mat exactly as he had found it.

Valkyrie had already stepped past him into the hallway. Someone was watching TV in a distant room. The house reeked of rotting flesh.

"Do you smell that?" She asked, turning around to face Skulduggery. He shut the door and removed his disguise, tucking it into his coat.

"Not really. What should I be smelling?"

"It smells like somebody died."

"Great observation. Somebody _did_ die, Valkyrie. We wouldn't be here otherwise, now would we?"

He followed the sounds of the TV and Valkyrie followed him. They stepped into a kitchen adjoined with a living room. There was a TV on the opposite wall, and a girl sat between them and it. She was kneeling with her back to them, and there was a remote in her hands.

"Daddy," she called. "Want to watch with me?"

Neither of them responded for several seconds, and the girl turned around. Valkyrie had miscalculated her age- the girl looked like she might be a year older than herself, but the way she spoke and the pajamas she dressed in made her seem infantile. Her dark hair was clumsily parted to the right, and the section that hadn't yet set into the pattern fell across her left eye. The uncovered one was light blue.

"Daddy?" Sara asked again, starting to rise. "Do you want to watch TV with me? It's your favorite program."

"I would love to watch, then," Skulduggery said cheerfully, as though he really was Sara's father. "What show is it?"

The girl giggled, fiddling with the remote control. "Silly daddy. It's Doctor Who, your favorite!"

The TV was showing a news broadcast of a body found off the coast of Spain. Valkyrie whispered, "What's going on?"

"Sara, sweetie." Skulduggery stepped closer, until he was maybe a foot behind her. "That's not Doctor Who. That's the news."

Sara went rigid, and her hands clamped around the remote like it was a lifeline. Her voice lost the childish playfulness when she said, "You're not my daddy."

"No, no I'm not," Skulduggery agreed, and a cabinet behind him slammed open. He whirled just in time to get a face full of glass plates, which blew him right over Sara. She glared at him as though she hated him, and Valkyrie ran up behind her, raising her hand to push the air.

The glass plates still floating above Skulduggery crashed to the floor as Sara suddenly screamed, moving away from Valkyrie in a flurry of movement, cowering against the far wall next to Skulduggery. "Don't hurt me daddy, don't hurt me!" She covered her face, and the sleeves of her pajamas fell down. Her arms were covered in old bruises.

Skulduggery shook the broken plates off as he sat up. "I'm not your father."

"Don't hurt me!"

"Your father is dead. He can't hurt you any more."

Sara wept. "I didn't mean to! He was going to... and..."

"I know." He reached over and put an arm around her shoulder. Sara leaned gratefully, curling into his side. "I know, Sara. There's a place you can go, with a new mother. I promise, she will not hurt you. Would you like to go there?"

The girl nodded, wiping her nose on the edges of her sleeves.

"Would you like to pack a bag to take with you?"

She nodded again, getting up and walking upstairs, stepping over the broken glass as if nothing had happened.

They didn't speak again until the Sanctuary officials had her. "That was really…" Valkyrie frowned, not knowing what she was going to say.

"Different?" Skulduggery asked.

"I was going for weird, but that works too."

Because Sara was of mortal parents and did not know what she was doing, she had not been charged with the murder of her parents and older sister, and was undergoing training. As soon as she was deemed fit for social interaction, she was released to a home with a trained magician who regularly took in abandoned children. _She_ had a happy ending.

Valkyrie tried not to blame her for that.

* * *

A/N: First chapter of Everything. This story isn't going to be in chronological order- this probably happened right before Playing with Fire.

Believe me, it doesn't make sense right now and it won't for several chapters, but it'll all fall into place eventually~


	2. Enter Detective Number Two

The morning was cold and clear, bringing a rosy flush to Valkyrie's cheeks. She had his address in her pocket and resisted the urge to pull it out and check it again- the numbers weren't about to change just because the house wasn't what she expected.

It didn't seem fit for someone who claimed to be "an old friend" of Skulduggery's to live in a place that seemed so... mundane. The light green paint of the house was chipping slightly, though the dark wooden door was kept in good shape. There was no apparent doorbell between the flowerpots on either side of the entrance, but there _was_ a stainless steel knocker, so she used that.

It took only a few seconds for footsteps to approach on the other side and she tensed in preparation, keeping her fingers pressed together. She was ready to call up a fireball at a moment's notice. The steps paused for a second and she almost flinched when the door opened, revealing a man with dark hair and dark glasses. He slid something into his back pocket. "I take it that you're Valkyrie?"

"Are you Justice?"

"Yeah. Come in." He stepped aside, opening the door wider for her. As he closed it he didn't turn his back to her. She returned the mistrust. A smile came to his lips, lighting up his entire face- what she could see of it, anyway.

"He told me about you. You're not what I expected."

She had no answer to that and he said nothing else as she looked around the entry hall. To the west was a spacious living room complete with a leather couch, sound system, and large, breakable windows. Behind Valkyrie was a modern kitchen, which she presumed was empty. She had oriented herself, unconsciously, towards the living room- it had the most readily available exit and it would be hard for the older, possibly stronger man to intercept her if she ran in that direction.

His smile didn't lessen as he watched her analyze her surroundings. In fact, it seemed as though everything she did seemed to amuse him. "You haven't even asked me my last name yet. You didn't ask me for it over the phone, either. Just wanted to talk to me. Unless Skulduggery told you...?"

"No, he didn't."

"He's not the type to talk about other people, I suppose. My surname is Blind."

Her gaze stopped flitting around the bookshelves filled with CDs and settled on his glasses, and he nodded. "That's right. I changed my name after... Well. I have tea, and you have questions for me."

"Uh, yeah." She was put off by his admission to being crippled. Her first reaction was a feeling of general, unsettling guilt. "I'm sorry about..."

He shrugged as he moved past her. "Why are you apologizing? For my eyes? Honestly, that's not your fault. It's nice of you to pity me, though." He reached up into a cupboard, pulling down a pair of mugs.

Well, jeez. If he was going to be touchy... Instead of commenting as he poured the tea, she leapt straight into her questions. "Do you know anything about goblins?"

"On the contrary, I know quite a bit. China Sorrows knows more, though."

Valkyrie wasn't sure how to take that, so she said what was on her mind. She figured that it was a mistake, but it was better than saying nothing at all. "China didn't want to talk to me."

"It figures. She and Bliss were just getting over their differences when he decided to get himself killed. It could have been her dying there, too, and that really just makes it worse. Add into that the fact that it would be easy to think that you could have done more or something and saved his life... well, she blames you. It's only natural."

Okay, the way that he somehow knew things that she thought were personal disturbed her. It must have showed on her face or something, because his smile widened. "I have ways of figuring these things out."

"Uh, well. Yeah. About goblins?"

"They don't like people, they're green and usually under four feet tall, and there are very few of them in Ireland. I wasn't kidding when I said that China knows more about them than I do. Do a Google search and I can tell you what's bullcrap and what isn't, but..." He shrugged. "We didn't deal with them much."

Valkyrie struggled not to comment on how unhelpful that was and moved onto her next question. She felt like an idiot- these conversations always flowed naturally for Skulduggery and he always learned exactly what he needed to."Do you know how to find a displaced... body part?"

Justice paused for a second. "I know that there's a spell to do it- at least, if you have part of a person, you can find the other part. We used it to track down the soldiers that escaped a battle but left parts behind."

That was interesting. "So they go back to their camp and...?"

Justice nodded. "We follow them. Eventually a few of their commanders got smart and would kill anyone who came back missing something, but we still got a general idea of where they were going."

"That's... couldn't they fool you, by leaving behind an arm or something and leaving the guy it belongs to in a trap?"

He smiled. "They did, very often. The deserters also caused us a lot of grief."

Valkyrie was caught up in the discussion of tactics and forgot her original questions. "But then you could question the ones that deserted in return for their life when you catch up to them! Although, the enemy could also give you bad information by disguising someone as a deserter..."

"And back and forth the tennis ball goes." Justice leaned back, seeming to study her more closely. "You have a knack for this."

"Thanks, I guess."

He didn't pay attention to her questioning gratitude and went down a completely different train of thought. "First you asked about goblins, and then about finding lost body parts. Two seemingly unconnected things, but they are apparently connected because you asked me about them in the same conversation. I know that goblins took Skulduggery's skull a while ago, so you apparently want to find it?"

Valkyrie hadn't meant for him to figure that out, even if it was no great secret. "...Kind of?"

"That's a yes. I hear it in your voice. It won't work."

"...What won't work?"

"Finding his skull. You can't find one if you can't find the other, so if Wreath said that you could find his skull by becoming a necromancer, he was lying. Unless, of course, you have a finger of Skulduggery's laying around, which I really doubt."

Justice's creepy habit of knowing more than she wanted was beginning to frighten her. "How did you...?"

The smile disappeared from his face and he began to speak like her geometry teacher explaining a proof. "Solomon dropped you off in his car and he's waiting just around the corner and you have the tattoo of initiation on your wrist. That means that you're going to become his apprentice at the next dark of the moon. He's been looking for someone to teach for the past forty years, and if Skulduggery thought you were worth the time and effort, you _definitely_ have passed Wreath's standards. He has a penchant for lying just to confuse people, so about something like this he would, of course, lie from the very start and only tell you the truth once you were bound to him and had your first shade."

Valkyrie hadn't thought that mere words would be able to set her world reeling like this, but Justice had seen in five minutes that she had been about to make a grievous mistake. That in itself made her suspicious. Wreath had recommended that she speak to this man, so why would he send her to someone that made her mistrust him? "How can I trust that you're telling the truth?"

"Why would I lie? It's a bad habit to get into. In twenty or so years, when you didn't depend on Wreath anymore, you would probably try to kill him for telling you that you could get Skulduggery back through his way of doing things and I won't have that problem because I will never have tried to deceive you."

Valkyrie didn't respond for quite a few minutes. Justice Blind had just utterly demolished the hope that she had in a few deft sentences. She had no way of getting Skulduggery back, so all that was left to her was a lying necromancer who wanted her as his student. "What do I do now?"

"First, I recommend going outside and telling Wreath to piss off. No, wait- can I do that? I really want to see the look on his face. He thinks that I'm an idiot."

"Sure." Valkyrie watched him push back his chair and looked up at him as he looked down at her. Something about that bothered her, as did the way he looked at her full mug and frowned before picking it up. She finally spoke the doubt that she had been having. "Aren't you blind?"

Justice's smile was back. "In a sense. Don't you want to watch me mess with your teacher?"

Valkyrie made a face. "He's not my teacher."

* * *

A/N: This is shortly after the Faceless Ones. Is it just me, or is Justice a creeper? I think he's a creeper. A creepy creeper. That _creeps_.

The first person that guesses what his power is gets an internet. I'll give you a hint: He's not an elemental.

*evil cackle*


End file.
